Tuesday, 24 March 2009

If like me you have SharePoint 2007 and Windows Server 2008 installed on the same computer for development purposes, you may find that you have problems signing into your SharePoint site once Internet Explorer 8 has been installed.

Update: This also appears to be happening on IE7 after the installation of recent Windows Update KB963027 - Thanks Virinder for the update.

The sign in request seemed to be trying to log me on using a domain name called PORTAL, which doesn't exist but is the NetBIOS name of my SharePoint site URL - portal.pacdomain.local. When I tried signing on using the DOMAINNAME\Username format, the logon failed with the same message in the event logs.

To resolve the issue, I followed the steps documented in the following article - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956158/en-us, which seems completely unrelated to the issue I was having as it references a problem when using SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services.

Thursday, 12 March 2009

There are many scenarios where you might want to store metadata on a site - for example, if you are creating project team sites, you might want to attach the project reference number, manager, RAG status, etc. If you are into development, you can do this by writing to the site property bag, but if you're not, the easiest way I have found is to create a custom list on the site and add your site information to the first item in the list.

This is very easy to do, and of course users will be able to add the information using the standard list edit form in the UI and you can assign appropriate permissions for specific people to add this information to the site.

There is one request I have had from users though, and that is to show the metadata in a Web Part on the home page of each site and allow new sites to be created from a template which also show the metadata on the home page by default. Whilst not the biggest fan of SharePoint Designer, it does allow you to do this quite easily:

1. Create your list on the site (I have called it Project Information for this example)

2. Create the columns to contain the metadata that you wish to store

3. Add at least one item to the list - I usually populate it by populating the Title column value with "Complete these details for this project by clicking "Edit Project Information" in the left-hand navigation" and creating a link to the EditForm.aspx file in the Quick Launch.

4. Create a new Web Part page on the site as a temporary home for your Web Part.